A short solo episode of The Speaking Body Podcast, building on a previous discussion of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice that does not take up the patient’s supposition that the analyst knows the patient’s unconscious, instead offering curiosity and a position of lack of knowledge.

• Neil argues this stance is unusual in the U.S. psychotherapeutic marketplace, where many therapies emphasize teaching skills, tools, and expert knowledge, but that the underlying ethic is not unique to psychoanalysis.
• He compares psychoanalysis to science, where experiments are driven by unanswered questions and results generate further questions, and to ethnography, where researchers enter unfamiliar settings with nonjudgmental curiosity to learn how people live.
• He references Chris Arnade’s “thick culture/thin culture” distinction and restates it psychoanalytically as unconscious plot versus conscious stage settings, and invites listeners to respond via speakingbody.substack.com.

00:00 Welcome and Setup

00:27 Recap Key Claims

01:50 Lacan and Curiosity

03:00 Beyond Psychoanalysis

05:08 Science as Not Knowing

05:57 Experiments and Replication

08:44 Ethnography Explained

11:45 Shared Ethic Across Fields

12:53 Chris Arnade Example

14:41 Thick vs Thin Culture

15:19 Closing and Support

In this short solo episode of The Speaking Body Podcast, I (Neil Gorman) try a new format and invite listeners to email feedback about whether they like it.

I explain a key difference between how psychoanalysis is practiced versus many forms of psychotherapy, coaching, or other helping relationships: when someone seeks help, they often engage in transference by supposing the helper has knowledge, authority, and power. In many cases, the helper accepts this supposition and provides advice, tools, or a treatment plan, which can be helpful.

By contrast, I argue that psychoanalysts do not take up this supposition of knowledge; instead, they adopt a position of not knowing and respond with curiosity, offering hypotheses and questions rather than prescriptions. I close by noting this stance is essential to psychoanalytic work and share where to learn more at speakingbody.substack.com.

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Table of contents

00:00 Welcome and Format

00:37 Big Idea Setup

02:02 Psychotherapy Side Explained

03:34 Transference and Authority

05:32 Helper Model Benefits

06:46 Switch to Psychoanalysis

07:58 Not Taking Transference

09:19 Curiosity Over Knowing

11:41 Interpretations as Hypotheses

13:02 Continuum Not Binary

13:54 Key Takeaway and Wrap

15:17 Thanks and Where to Find

In this episode, I announce that I’m rebranding and relaunching my podcast, previously called the Informed Podcast, as Speaking Body. I explain that Speaking Body will be both a podcast and a website (speakingbody.com) that will archive my writing, offer a newsletter, and sometimes include video episodes on YouTube, while keeping the same RSS feed for subscribers.

Going forward, I will focus less on applying psychoanalytic theory and focus more on psychoanalysis and on how psychoanalytic work leaves the consulting room and affects everyday life and subjectivity. While I will sometimes use specialized Lacanian terms (e.g., jouissance, discourse of the master, object a, imaginary/symbolic/real, drive), I aim to restate key ideas in more commonplace language whenever possible.